freagle

Th exception proves the rule. Department of Transportation is not market driven. DPW is not market driven. Army Corps of Engineers is not market driven.

And that’s just the US. Look to the rest of the world and you’ll see that most infrastructure is not market driven at all.

And even in the cases where they have to get private companies to do the build, the INFRASTRUCTURE ITSELF is not market driven, it’s the talent that’s market driven.

You said universities share information in “marketplaces of ideas”.

No. But describing all social interactions as “markets” is distinctly Neoliberal brain rot

You don’t know what markets are then.

Modern infrastructure in China is built by state owned enterprises and funded by the government. There is no price competition, and the infrastructure is not sold on the market as a commodity.

“Marketplaces of ideas and information” would be places where you could purchase ideas and information and resell them. That’s what a market is. That’s not how universities work. They receive planned funding for planned research and conduct planned research according to forward looking plans without regard to the market demand for specific outcomes. Granted IP markets are layered on top of that but they pervert the entire process and they are totally artificial.

The idea that you think markets are not actual systems but just a descriptive word used to refer to various non-marker realities indicates that you are fully saturated with neoliberalism and need a detox.

Please don’t confuse actual technological progress with markets. These two things have always been separate. The intellectual property market is a huge problem for innovation, and it exists because the market system is inherently a resource control system, and resource control systems that are driven by market dynamics are huge problems for innovation.

Modern infrastructure is not built by markets. University materials research is not driven by markets.

Exciting modernization in entertainment and sports

Whut?

That “drama” in Hong Kong is the result of 100 years of British colonial occupation. North Korea is the result of the US bombing the entire country until there were literally no structures left. Koreans in the North needed to live in caves to avoid being covered in napalm (and if you haven’t read about how napalm interacts with human flesh, please do).

China is not the bad guy in these situations. Britain, the US, France, Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany - these are the bad guys.

I mean you did compare them and you’re still comparing them. You’re saying they’re both bad. That’s literally a comparison.

China is selling arms to anyone and everyone that wants them. Is that meddling or mercantilism?

By comparison, the US is committing mass murder almost daily.

No, they’re not both “bad”. The US is atrocious and China is selling weapons to bad people.

Pure gold

China did not imperialize Tibet. The Mongols did.

See, the Mongols were a violent expansionist force. They occupied China and they occupied Tibet. The Chinese managed to expel the Mongols from China and rebuild their nation. Then in the early 1700, the Chinese expelled the Mongols from Tibet, freeing Tibet.

Because Tibet was unable to remain free if the Mongols would return, China established a permanent defensive military presence, establishing Tibet as a protectorate, but leaving it self-governed.

A century later the Europeans imperialized China, crushing it militarily, economically, and legally. As part of this, Tibet saw a rise in a monarchical theocracy enslaved 95% of Tibetan people, torturing and murdering them indiscriminately.

A few decades after China recovered, it returned to Tibet to free the Tibetan people from that monarchy and once against established Tibet as a self-governing independent protectorate, which it remains to this day.

In the last 400 years, I don’t think that any meaningful number of countries in the world have ever recognized Tibet as an independent state, and outside of the brutal theocratic monarchy, I don’t think the Tibetan people have ever sought to establish that they are an independent country.

Still not a good analogy because Puerto Rico was never a state of the USA. It would be more like if Long Island had been invaded by England and occupied after England beat the US in a war, and then the US had a war to kick the English off long island and then had a civil war immediately afterward and the loser fled to Long Island and said “we are the rightful government of the USA” and then Spain came by and started arming the fuck out of them while the loser of the civil war ran a fascist dictatorship for 40 years and killed tens of thousands of its own people for ever saying “maybe we could just negotiate a final surrender?”

Yes. Integration means less conflict, more collaboration, less redundancy, more dynamism, less wasteful military build up, fewer threats from the US.

One country two systems means that China provides for national defense of the entire space while Taiwan maintains a substantial amount of governing autonomy.

Think of it like Greenland choosing to be a part of Denmark to keep itself safe from the US military, except in this example Greenland would be historically part of Denmark for centuries and have a population of 99% Danes and have some parts of Greenland only 4 miles off the coast of Denmark with US troops already stationed on it training Danes on Greenland to fight the mainland.

“try using whatever your brain instead of”

Does not parse

I thought they only had one, in South Africa. Where are the other 2?

Could you restate this?

Are you comparing economic collaboration with installing military bases?

China has exactly one foreign military base. It’s in South Africa. They are very happy with it and there’s no contention.

By contrast, US military bases in Japan are notorious for raping, kidnapping, and other abuses of locals.

No. China does not also “meddle” in the rest world.

There is no “claim” to be made and there is no “reclaim” to be had against such a claim.

Taiwan is and always has been recognized as part of the country of China. That’s why the losing army in the civil war went there - because it was part of the country they were a party of.

China has stated for 70 years that the island province of Taiwan will be integrated into the rest of the governance of the country. For 50 years it has explicitly stated it will be integrated peacefully, because the CPC recognizes that doing it forcefully would actually be contradictory and create a constant guerilla warfare situation as well as invite the world’s militaries to intervene. The CPC has no intention of forcing Taiwan to integrate except if Taiwan works with foreign governments to establish a substantial and real threat to the security of the mainland.

If China waits long enough, the Western economies will collapse and Taiwan will very quickly and easily realize that the West just can’t support them anymore and when they look to see who they depend on for nearly everything, and who their relatives are and who their dominant trading partner and who can protect them militarily, it’s going to be an easy process of integrating the provincial government of Taiwan into the government of the mainland - especially since the CPC is committed to One Country Two System meaning the provincial government of Taiwan can continue operating with the same structure and same politicians and same processes as it has now.

You do realize that the US uses prisoners as slave labor to the tune of $11B annually, right?

Would you say that a government is functional if a highly biased university research project spanning 15 years determined that over 95% of people approved of their government, even accounting for the possible ways these numbers could be skewed?

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/

Nor does China suffer the same recidivism rates, carceral rates, or parole rates that the US has. Nor does China accrue debt for prisoners tonthe tune of hundreds of dollars a day that they owe when they get out.

Uh. Friend. I hate to tell you this, but the US imprisons more people per capital than the Soviet GULAG system at its height. China has never imprisoned people at the rate the USA has. Even in the last 18 months, where the USA dropped out of the top slot in the world, it lost to Cuba who recently had a huge uptick in incarceration due to the US’s most recent attempts at recruiting dissidents. And the USA is only slightly better than Cuba on this number. And Cuban prisons are like, fully integrated into communities and don’t rely on torture and don’t have gang violence and don’t charge prisoners hundreds of dollars a day and don’t use them as slave labor the way the US does.

No. On this particular issue of locking up whomever they want for whatever reason and abusing them and letting them die and massive recidivism and a parole population that is under 24/7 surveillance that is something like 2x larger than the prison population - on this topic, the US is not somehow sliding towards being problematic. It has been this way for a century. The US is a brutal brutal regime to its own people.